How That Amazing Princess Scene Came To Be In “Ralph Breaks The Internet”

The long-anticipated sequel to Wreck-It Ralph, justly called Ralph Breaks The Internet, took last year’s D23 by storm when they unveiled a hilarious, and a very unexpected clip featuring all the Disney Princesses in their canon. The clip, which shows Vanellope Von Schweetz (Sarah Silverman) meeting the princesses in a sitting room, sent the audience into roars of laughter, and the internet was truly buzzing about this very un-Disney like clip that they decided to unveil to the biggest gathering of Disney fans in the world to promote the film.

Since then, portions of the clip were included in the first trailer for the film, which currently has over 15 million views on YouTube, in a large part due to that scene.

During an early press day, writer Pamela Ridon shared that she was first approached in early talks about the Wreck It Ralphsequel, when she was working on Moana, which is when she started to wonder why isn’t Vanellope canon? “She’s a princess, and she’s a President,” she stated to a room full of press at the presentation, “I believe a gal can have more than one title, but that was in the back of my mind.”

As the story of Ralph Breaks The Internet started to form, the team knew they wanted to focus on exploring what the internet truly was. That ran the gamut from going to Downtown LA to tour and research the One Wilshire building where most of the cities servers are stored, to watching (and obsessing) over memes, cat videos, pop culture and more. When it came down to the princess scene, Ridon took that concept and decided to go very meta, because “as we were talking about all the different parts of the internet, you gotta do something meta, right? Wouldn’t it be fun to have Disney poking fun at itself a little bit?”

The concept began as a proposed scene where Vanellope might be going viral, but the question was, how? Similarly to how Ellen DeGeneres truly did break the internet back in 2015 when she took a selfie at the Oscars with several of Hollywood A-listers, Ridon thought that in the Disney universe, the Princesses would be just what was needed to break the internet. After consulting with her friend, Elise Aliberti, a producer on Moana, and who she calls a “Mickeypedia”, she called her to make sure she got her Princess canon history correct and said that she told Aliberti, “I have all these princesses and I have all these tropes and I just want to make sure I have it right. Where the following kidnapped? Where the following poisoned? Where the following enslaved?” Which was met with Aliberti exclaiming, “Pam, what are you doing?”

But confident she had a great scene, she wrote a first draft, and upon finishing it, she laid down on the ground and “had a true panic attack. I thought, oh I might get fired if I turn this in.”

“Or,” she stated, “something really big is going to happen here.”

Thankfully director Rich Moore thought so too. Instead of axing the idea, (Ridon says Moore asked her if she thought they could get away with it. But his official line was “let’s board it and see what happens”), she headed to story boarding it and provided the scratch voice for all the princesses, and had to present it to the directors. At the end of the clip she played, the directors applauded.

“I remember getting goosebumps at that moment cause I was like, oh man, we are going to do this!”